Tired of iPhone/Safari lying

It appears that mainstream media journalists and many of the so called technology pundits are actually clueless, gullible idiots who’ll eat anything dished out in a shiny package. They’ve been so completely fooled by Apple’s rhetoric of ‘first time full internet on a mobile device’ that they wouldn’t even consider looking out there for the truth. Fact is, Opera Mini has been giving a pretty decent ‘full internet’ experience for some time now although being software makers, they really couldn’t do much about device screen sizes.

But more recently, Nokia has been shipping a fantastic browser on its latest phones such as the N95 well before the iPhone came out. Their browser renders websites as on a regular desktop browser and has the mini-map view that Apple loves to show off in their Safari/iPhone videos. In fact, the Nokia browser goes further and actually provides offline mode, form autocomplete and a password manager in their browser! I’d love to watch iPhone users tap out their username/password again and again and again. What is the most incredulous thing in all of this is that the Nokia browser and Apple’s Safari are both based on the same open source WebKit code base!

Here’s the latest sample of this brand of ‘journalism’ from Betanews:

Opera Mini arguably does a better job, but requires Java and does not work on many popular phones such as the Samsung Blackjack. [snip] This is what makes the iPhone’s debut especially important, because an answer has finally been found.

So Opera Mini is ruled out ‘cos it is available only on a few (i.e. a few hundred) phones but all hail Safari ‘cos it’s available on a grand total of one phone! What a way to make your point. The rest of the article is pretty much senseless too, with only a tangential mention of Nokia. It says Nokia is licensing touchscreen technology in a response to the iPhone - Nokia has been demoing touchscreen concepts before the iPhone’s debut. And talking in those terms (feature-against-feature) doesn’t even make sense. It’s not like there weren’t any touchscreen phones before the iPhone.. heck, I owned a Motorola E680 touchscreen until last year! Apple’s genius is in building a compelling user interface around that technology. You can’t license that!

From the videos I’ve seen, the iPhone looks like a pretty sweet device with a great user experience and it has most certainly forced everyone else to up their game, especially Nokia whose S60v3 is probably the slowest mobile OS on the market. But can we stop with all the lying please?